so I am trying to make it so my friends can connect to my minecraft server. So I look up my public ip address and type it in. It does not work. I proceed to port forward and try again, nothing. I look up the public ip address on a different device on my network and it is the same as the server. How could I find a device specific ip address so that my friends could join if all of the public ip addresses are the same?
Your network has a public IP address, your computer does not. You can either tell your router to send any requests to a certain port to your computers internal ip address or you can set up a virtual private network for your friends to connect to.
I would definitely recommend the virtual private network route as it is much more secure and safe than opening a port on your router. There are many guides online about how to do this part